This course is intended to train students in skills required by the discipline, help prepare them for a range of futures, and integrate them into the university community.

• Days/Times: Th 9:30AM - 12:30PM
• Instructor: Da, Nan
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

This graduate seminar will examine the long history, dating back to the eighteenth century, of reflection on the nature of the modern university and the place of the humanities within it. With a focus on the much-discussed “crisis” of the contemporary humanities, it will examine the emergence and evolution of the humanistic disciplines. Have the humanities in the academy always been in crisis? What could this possibly mean and what does it imply about how we practice the humanities today?

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:30PM
• Instructor: Mufti, Aamir
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 4/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course considers the 'conjugal imaginary' in early modern European religious, scientific, economic, and political thought. Readings in early modern literature (More, Erasmus, Shakepseare, Milton, Cavendish, Behn, Locke, Astell) as well as theorists of family, feminism, and sexuality (Engels, Foucault, Cooper, Butler, Lowe, Kottman, Federici, Wynter). Topics include: the ‘sexual contract’ and patriarchalism; the 'private' as opposed to the 'public' sphere; the disciplining of the body; the establishment of racialized and gendered categories of humans; the definition of labor as production or reproduction; coercion and consent; the new anthropological logics regarding the global (in cross-confessional intimacies or with with partners outside Europe); and the new sciences of population and economies of resource management that shaped the emergent colonial logics. We will ask how early modern sexual regimes of consigning the family and sexuality to the intimate and economic spheres shape the meaning of politics in the period 1500-1700.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:30PM
• Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course explores texts from the 19th and 20th centuries that query the distinction between magical, occult, and supernatural discourses and scientific and rational inquiry. Modernism has often been seen to usher in a new and thoroughly disenchanted literature. But this view overlooks texts from across the wider period that challenge the boundaries between ‘official’ and ‘heterodox’ knowledges. Ranging across genres including experimental literatures, life writing, ghost stories and folk tales this course explores how and why writers such as H.G. Wells, Vernon Lee, Zora Neale Hurston, H.D., Shirley Jackson, R.K. Narayan, and J.M. Coetzee imagine the re-enchantment of the world.

• Days/Times: T 10:00AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Hobson, Suzanne
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 4/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD students in their second year. This indicates they are actively participating as a TA as required by the program.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 9/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

This is an independent study for third years preparing for their candidacy oral exams

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This is an independent study for third years preparing for their candidacy oral exams

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This is an independent study for third years preparing for their candidacy oral exams

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This is an independent study for third years preparing for their candidacy oral exams

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Jackson, Lawrence P
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This is an independent study for third years preparing for their candidacy oral exams

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Mao, Douglas
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This is an independent study for third years preparing for their candidacy oral exams

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Miller, Andrew H
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. This indicates they are actively teaching a course as required by the program.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. This indicates they are actively performing an administrative/service role with the program/department or university that precludes any teaching responsibilities.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 30/40
• PosTag(s): n/a

We will use the meanings and methodologies of “materiality” to examine the medieval world, by analyzing objects, texts, networks, patterns of circulation and appropriation, aesthetics and enshrinement, production and knowledge communities.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Lester, Anne E.
• Room: Gilman 305
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

Humanists possess a reservoir of scholarly abilities that prime them for contributing to debates well beyond the academy. This semester-long workshop will introduce graduate students to the basics of writing for such broad audience. Each session will be organized around particular topics in public humanities writing, including the pitching, writing, editing, and publishing processes of newspapers, magazines, and online outlets. We will also consider the forms of writing that most allow scholars to draw from their academic training and research: reviews, personal essays, op-eds, interviews, and profiles. Throughout the course we will see how the interdisciplinarity, comparativism, and multilingualism of fields from across the humanities can be helpful for reaching wide audiences. Beyond the nuts and bolts of getting started in so-called “public” writing, this course aspires to teach graduate students how to combine quality writing with academic knowledge, scholarly analysis with a general intellectual readership—and, ultimately, make academic knowledge a public good. Taught in English.

• Days/Times: T 3:30PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Lurtz, Casey Marina
• Room: Gilman 490
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Knowing who or what counts as a person seems straightforward, until we consider the many kinds of creatures, objects, and artificial beings that have been granted—or demanded or denied—that status. This course explores recent debates on being a person in culture, law, and philosophy. Questions examined will include: Should trees have standing? Can corporations have religious beliefs? Could a robot sign a contract? Materials examined will be wide-ranging, including essays, philosophy, novels, science fiction, television, film. No special background is required.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 1/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course explores recent developments and disputes in critical theory in relation to their longer philosophical genealogies. The three topics—autonomy, form, and critique—have been the subject of much recent debate, contention, and new analysis, yet each was also a source of critical and philosophical interest in years past. Our aim will be to make sense of today’s exciting and controversial interventions in conversation with earlier theory. “Historical” theory writing will include Poe, Adorno, Benjamin, Lukács, Cavell, R. Williams, Shklovsky, and Jameson; contemporary theory will include Stephen Best, Barbara Fields, Sharon Marcus, Walter Benn Michaels, Sianne Ngai, Nicholas Brown, Rita Felski, Caroline Levine, Mark McGurl, and Toril Moi.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 8/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

It has lately been recognized that the middle of the twentieth century was a period of exceptional literary invention. The 1930s through the 1960s gave us challenging, fascinating, sometimes infuriating texts that offer crucial windows onto the birth of the postwar world order and thus into the life of our own time. This course will examine British mid-century writing addressing the aftermath of World War II, the rise of the welfare state, and the “colonization in reverse” that brought the Windrush writers from the Caribbean to England. Authors studied may include Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, T.S. Eliot, Richard Hoggart, George Lamming, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings, Sam Selvon, Alan Sillitoe, John Osborne, and John Wyndham.

• Days/Times: W 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Mao, Douglas
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

This seminar will investigate the staging of sacrifice at the border between scripture and literature. Imagined variously as a crucial site of affective investment, a bloody spectacle of corporeal destruction and a means of familial or communal rescue, sacrifice connects the history and theory of religious doctrine to political questions of sovereign power and aesthetic questions of form and genre. In this graduate seminar we will examine a sequence of sacrificial scenes primarily from classical literature, Hebrew scripture and early modern literature. We will conclude with a final discussion of contemporary art and culture. Across these transhistorical discussions, we will study and test the affordances of an array of theories of sacrifice. What forms of agency are modeled by the available logics of sacrifice? How does sacrifice operate across drama, lyric poetry and the early novel? Can we refuse the logic of sacrifice? Possible texts and authors include: Euripides’ “Hecuba” and “Iphigenia at Aulis”, late medieval passion plays on the death of Jesus, George Buchanan’s “Jephtha”, John Lyly’s “Gallathea”, William Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” and “The Merchant of Venice”, John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets”, George Herbert’s “The Temple”, John Milton’s “The Passion”, Aphra Behn’s “Oroonoko”, and philosophical and theoretical writings by Søren Kierkegaard, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Rene Girard, Eugenie Brinkema and others.

• Days/Times: Th 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/8
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD students in their first spring semester. They will get their first bit of experience with TAship responsibilities.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD students in their second year. This indicates they are actively participating as a TA as required by the program.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD students/candidates in their third year. This indicates they are actively teaching a course as required by the program.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. This indicates they are actively teaching a course as required by the program.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. This indicates they are actively performing an administrative/service role with the program/department or university that precludes any teaching responsibilities.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. For those who receive external funding and will neither do the expected teaching or participate in any kind of departmental service as required.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD students who have successfully passed their exam and have entered "candidacy." The DGS will host workshops over the course of the spring to help with writing the dissertation prospectus that will outline their dissertation project.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD students who have successfully passed their exam and have entered "candidacy." This indicates they are actively writing/working on their dissertation prospectus that will outline their dissertation project.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W; Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 40/40
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course introduces basic computational techniques in the context of empirical humanistic scholarship. Topics covered include the command-line, basic Python programming, and experimental design. While illustrative examples are drawn from humanistic domains, the primary focus is on methods: those with specific domains in mind should be aware that such applied research is welcome and exciting, but will largely be their responsibility beyond the confines of the course. Students will come away with tangible understanding of how to cast simple humanistic questions as empirical hypotheses, ground and test these hypotheses computationally, and justify the choices made while doing so. No previous programming experience is required.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Lippincott, Tom; Sirin Ryan, Hale
• Room: Bloomberg 168
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course introduces substantial machine learning methods of particular relevance to humanistic scholarship. Areas covered include standard models for classification, regression, and topic modeling, before turning to the array of open-source pretrained deep neural models, and the common mechanisms for employing them. Students are expected to have a level of programming experience equivalent to that gained from AS.360.304, Gateway Computing, AS.250.205, or Harvard’s CS50 for Python. Students will come away with an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different machine learning models, the ability to discuss them in relation to human intelligence and to make informed decisions of when and how to employ them, and an array of related technical knowledge.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Backer, Samuel Ehrlich; Messner, Craig A
• Room: Bloomberg 168
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a